The Conception of the Disney universe : Toon Town


    The movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988) shows a particular conception of the universe of Disney characters... In this movie, all of the Disney characters live in a town called "Toon Town", together with the Warner Bros characters, the Tex Avery characters and some other cartoon characters such as Betty Boop,...
The town is owned by Marvin Acme. It is only inhabitted by cartoon characters, and all of the vehicles, objects and buildings are alive too. The three shorts "Tummy Trouble" (1989), "Rollercoaster Rabbit" (1990), and "Trail Mix-Up" (1993), also featuring Roger Rabbit and his friends, happen in this universe too, and so do the comic stories based on these movies. The Bonkers series (1993), featuring Bonkers D. Bobcat, Lucky Piquel, Fall-Apart Rabbitt, and lots of other wacky characters seem to happen in the same universe too. This theory is quite interresting (the meeting between Donald Duck and Daffy Duck is pretty hilarious, for instance...), but it doesn't agree with a lot of shows, like Duck Tales for instance, and the quasi-totality of Disney comics, even if all of the shows are supposed to be "movies" with the Toons acting as "actors", it doesn't satisfy me much. It's impossible to build other interresting theories about Disney characters (for instance, family relations between characters, geographic places,...) if you accept this one...
 



Toon Town as seen in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"


But the other point is that it doesn't agree either with the theories which are relevant to the "second half" of Toon Town inhabitants : the Looney Tunes !!! In the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, the characters seem to act more as animals than the Disney characters (Donald Duck is more likely to be compared with a human being, while Daffy Duck is more a Duck than a human...). According  to the movie "Space Jam" (1996), the Looney Tunes live in a parallel world located in the center of Earth (the gate to this world looks like the beginning of all the Looney Tunes cartoon : the red circles with the Bugs Bunny head in the middle)... Moreover, in the "Tiny Toons" series (1990), the main characters (Buster Bunny, Babs Bunny, Plucky Duck,...), which seem to be childish versions of the classic Looney Tunes characters (as Claude Marin's "Disney Babies" are childish versions of Disney classic characters), are living in the "Acme country", they go to the Acme Loonyversity, and their teachers are the classic Loony Tunes characters (Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, Sylvester,...).

But well, that's up to you to interpret this universe... :-)
 

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